We may be seeing 1 terabyte hard drives by year end claims Hitachi. The hard drive giant is currently working on 3.5-inch drives that pack up to 1TB of storage capacity. Seagate is currently shipping the world's largest, weighing in at 750GB. Several companies -- including Seagate/Maxtor -- are already shipping 1TB or greater storage units that are made up of smaller hard drives. DailyTech previously reported that Seagate launched a home/SOHO based network attached storage (NAS) unit under the Maxtor brand that contained two 500GB hard drives. Even Seagate's long-time SCSI flagship Cheetah reached record capacities this year.

Hitachi Storage's president of product strategy Bill Healy told reporters that 1TB drives will be put into home computers and servers this year. Healy mentioned that storage density in magnetic media doubles every two years and so 1TB drives are coming soon.

Other high capacity storage options are on the way as well. As DailyTech previously reported, Hitachi-Maxell is set to launch its new line of holographic media later this year, starting with 300GB discs and scaling up to 1.6TB discs by 2010. The current technology is based on rotating disc media like we have today, although some analysts predict that in a few years, we should have solid-state, non-moving holographic storage similar to that which was shown on several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.